There are two wildly different pursuits you must execute to build great products:
1. Build what customers want
2. Bet on an unproven future
We tend to over complicate or over-wield the former, creating complex mechanisms by which customer feedback is quantified, abstracted, frameworked-away. PMs find the simplest form distasteful (“ugh, why build for one prospect?”) and struggles to implement at scale (hence “no” culture.)
Building what customers want is a tactical, commercial minded pursuit with narrower lanes of creativity. This is where speed matters. The best at this are relentlessly practical, with real customer empathy and a big dash of competitiveness.
Then there are the big ol bets, which die of human causes: fear, bureaucracy, ego. These are the ideas that get killed in committee, or rot as a crappy MVP, or get called a distraction.
It’s extremely hard to get good at big bets.
The cheat code? Unreasonable people:
Unreasonable people who simply will a future to be true. They say “this is how the world will look, see ya there!” They are OK being wrong (but usually aren’t.) They are, for lack of better word, zealots. These are your founders or your founders-at-heart.
The worst thing you can do in a org that has a big thinker is pair them with a team of skeptics—the frameworks and “prove it” and the process. It’s like the first hires at a startup being begrudgingly assigned contractors. You’d never do it. They’d never win.
If the first group (build what customers want!) needs execution velocity, the second group (bet on the future) needs vision velocity, where an insight about the market hits an ambitious set of creative thinkers and builds an imagination flywheel that unlocks a Big Idea™️.
So think about which of these skills you need.
Think about which profile you are.
And then leaders: think about how to build human systems around them.
You’ll never get great without both models.
And your team is where the magic happens.
Build thoughtfully! 🚀
1. Build what customers want
2. Bet on an unproven future
We tend to over complicate or over-wield the former, creating complex mechanisms by which customer feedback is quantified, abstracted, frameworked-away. PMs find the simplest form distasteful (“ugh, why build for one prospect?”) and struggles to implement at scale (hence “no” culture.)
Building what customers want is a tactical, commercial minded pursuit with narrower lanes of creativity. This is where speed matters. The best at this are relentlessly practical, with real customer empathy and a big dash of competitiveness.
Then there are the big ol bets, which die of human causes: fear, bureaucracy, ego. These are the ideas that get killed in committee, or rot as a crappy MVP, or get called a distraction.
It’s extremely hard to get good at big bets.
The cheat code? Unreasonable people:
Unreasonable people who simply will a future to be true. They say “this is how the world will look, see ya there!” They are OK being wrong (but usually aren’t.) They are, for lack of better word, zealots. These are your founders or your founders-at-heart.
The worst thing you can do in a org that has a big thinker is pair them with a team of skeptics—the frameworks and “prove it” and the process. It’s like the first hires at a startup being begrudgingly assigned contractors. You’d never do it. They’d never win.
If the first group (build what customers want!) needs execution velocity, the second group (bet on the future) needs vision velocity, where an insight about the market hits an ambitious set of creative thinkers and builds an imagination flywheel that unlocks a Big Idea™️.
So think about which of these skills you need.
Think about which profile you are.
And then leaders: think about how to build human systems around them.
You’ll never get great without both models.
And your team is where the magic happens.
Build thoughtfully! 🚀
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